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Chad Dickerson to join Etsy in New York

Chad Dickerson writes about leaving Yahoo! and starting his new job at Etsy running their technology efforts. He’ll be relocating to New York after spending 10 years in the Bay Area.

“To my Bay Area friends and colleagues, you have given me so much in my time here, I can’t thank you enough. The time I spent out in California this past ten years has literally been life-changing. To my New York friends, I look forward to reconnecting.”

It’s great to see talented people getting rewarded for their hard work. Unfortunately, this is a loss for Yahoo! who needs forward-thinking leaders like Chad who can make things happen. Retention must be top of mind at Yahoo! before key institutional knowledge slips out the door and forces people to rethink things that have already been thought through.

There are lots of great reasons to participate in the future of Yahoo! where the Open Strategy stuff is unfolding. The Flickr Era set the stage for a lot of these smart ideas at Yahoo!. I only worry that the pace of release at the company will fail to create the impact that will make those changes matter. It’s not uncommon for great technology to lose due to bad timing.

The timing worked well for Chad and Etsy, though. He’s going to be a huge asset to Etsy at an important stage in its growth. If it wasn’t already, Etsy should be ranked high on everyone’s companies-to-watch leaderboard.

The Flickr Era

I’ve been wondering how the Flickr era was going to close for a while, but the resignation letter couldn’t have been a more fitting ending to the story. Looking back, I think there were a lot of smart things that Yahoo! did during that time which are easy to overlook. The end result of the action muted the intent, in many cases, but the desire to do the right thing was and is still very prevalent.

I’ve been playing around with Swivel, Dipity, Timeline and Google Docs a bit recently to try different ways to use data for storytelling. So, the flickr departure news seemed like a great time to give these things a shot.

Below is the “flickr era timeline”, the smart things that Yahoo! did from early 2005 to the middle of 2008:

I’ve also opened sharing on the spreadsheet. Feel free to add to it.

Here’s the embed code for the timeline:

London hackers are back

It seems very strange blogging about this topic from my desk here in London. If there’s one constant in the Internet, it is change. But one thing that is still the same a year on — hacking is alive and well.

This coming Saturday hackers will again descend onto London’s Alexandra Palace to come up with some new ideas with their fellow coders. The same basic rules apply: hack anything you can think of in 24 hours and then demo your creation in 90 seconds. From what I hear, there are a few new twists to the event that could make it really interesting.

BBC is driving the event this time, and they’ve called it Mashed. The Guardian is one of the sponsors, and they’ve just opened up an additional 100 tickets in our name. So, if you can code or build stuff, grab a place now and come join the fun:

http://mashed08.eventbrite.com/

Here are a few links of interest:

O’Reilly prescient on the DataPortability issue

I just found this nugget while scanning for a quote to use from Tim O’Reilly’s 2005 article “What is Web 2.0“:

“Much as the rise of proprietary software led to the Free Software movement, we expect the rise of proprietary databases to result in a Free Data movement within the next decade. One can see early signs of this countervailing trend in open data projects such as Wikipedia, the Creative Commons, and in software projects like Greasemonkey, which allow users to take control of how data is displayed on their computer.”

I’m not sure he imagined it happening in the social data game at the time he wrote this, but it’s pretty clear he was grokking the issues at both macro and micro levels. He at least understood the dynamics that led us into today’s DataPortability debate.

Good presentation from Yahoo! CTO

I was really pleased to see Yahoo! make a public statement about some of the work going on internally to transform the way the company operates and the resulting changes in the product line. As Cody Simms added in his blog post on YDN:

“We’re moving from a model in which each Yahoo! property develops much of its own technology to one where we share common data and frameworks that can be easily surfaced across multiple Yahoo! properties and off the Yahoo.com network. It’s a major rewiring of Yahoo!. “

Here’s the video of Yahoo! CTO Ari Balogh’s keynote at Web 2.0 Expo:

Now, there wasn’t a lot of time in Ari’s presentation. That meant that he had to focus and left out some important pieces, in my mind.

First, he definitely understated the cluefulness the company has shown with things like Fire Eagle, MyBlogLog, Y! Live, OpenID and Hadoop support, Pipes, YUI and, of course, Flickr, to name a few. Yahoo! has innovated around openness and Internet services for a long time. The company needs to be proud of those things and recognize that the advances on these small teams really matter. In fact, it’s those types of advances that I find most compelling in Yahoo!’s arsenal as opposed to the things that help me “get distribution on Yahoo!’s monumentally popular properties”.

I was also a little disappointed that Ari didn’t at least touch on how the company intends to serve the wider Internet and all the activity happening outside of yahoo.com. There are a lot of ways everyone benefits from Yahoo!’s data, tools and services wherever those things are used, but he focused exclusively on what happens on yahoo.com.

Lastly, it would have been nice to hear about how developers can benefit from Yahoo!’s ad platform or to hear whatever other ways they can build businesses in the Yahoo! ecosystem. All things considered, I think that was a forgivable omission. I hope they don’t take too long to answer that question, though.

My criticisms here are purely driven by my desire to see Yahoo! win. Again, I know there’s some great stuff happening there, and I love seeing the company stand up and speak with confidence about its future. It should do more of that.

I’m looking forward to seeing all this unfold in the coming months. Well done, Yahoo!.

Step 1: Define vision. done
Step 2: Make it so.

My new gig at the Guardian in London

At the end of April I will be joining the Guardian in London to build a new developer program there.

This is a fantastic opportunity in many ways. Perhaps what’s most appealing to me is the direction the Guardian is going — they are totally focused on building a great online business, and it all starts with great journalism. As Jeff Jarvis reported from a management meeting there about a year ago,

“Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, told the staff of his newspaper that now ‘all journalists work for the digital platform’ and that they should regard ‘its demands as preeminent.’…They issued a set of principles to work by. And this was surrounded by much deserved — in my biased opinion — back-patting for good journalism and innovation and, from managing director Tim Brooks and company head Carolyn McCall, for business progress.”

In addition, being owned by a trust committed to preserving the core values of journalism provides a very powerful foundation for using the Internet to offer important services for developers around the world. From the Guardian Media Group web site:

“The Trust was created in 1936 to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of the Guardian. Its core purpose is to preserve the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity, while its subsidiary aims are to champion its principles and to promote freedom of the press in the UK and abroad.”

With it’s history of championing data freedom, the Guardian is a great environment for opening up data that matters to people. The Guardian’s Simon Waldman points out:

“Charles Arthur and his gang have been banging their ‘Free our data’ drum for two years now. This week, under the slightly optimistic headline: In sight of victory, they cover a report which proves their case that their is more value to be created by opening up publicly owned data than by giving government agencies control over it.”

This is also a great opportunity for me, personally. I lived in London a few years ago now when I was with The Industry Standard and loved it. I met my wife and got married there and always planned to return someday. (I’m curious to see how fast my daughter’s accent changes…my wife has been trying in vain to get her to speak the ‘correct’ way. “Water is pronounced wottah, not waddr.”) And I’m looking forward to living in the same city as my brother Mitch again. Many pints to enjoy together, brother.

It’s also difficult to leave Yahoo! with all the exciting developments happening there. I came to Yahoo! in 2005 during the Flickr era when lots of people were innovating on different approaches to openness. Now, it seems, the drive toward openness is having a major impact on the company and the Internet as a whole. I’m glad I was able to at least participate in getting things moving in that direction.

At the same time, I’m really excited to be working with some outstanding people at the Guardian, some I already know, many I’ve recently met and many who I’ve only heard about still. I can’t wait to find out what other ideas are cooking in addition to our plans to open up data and services for developers.

Meantime, anyone interested in buying a nice little house in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill, please drop me a line. Oh, and let me know if you have any interest in looking after our dog (terrier/beagle mix) while he’s in the pet immigration waiting period (about 6 months).

I’ll continue to use this blog to comment on what’s going on in the online media market as I see it. I may also twitter the inane details of our move across the pond for our friends and family. So, stay tuned as this new adventure unfolds.

How recommendations can isolate people

It’s curious to me that Findory is fading on us, perhaps slipping into oblivion. It’s not the only startup with a good idea to see the lights dimming through the window of opportunity. And it’s certainly not for a lack of insight or technical chops.


I love the idea of automatic learning and recommendations. But the application of that concept makes more sense in the context of an experience as opposed to an experience itself. Last.fm understands this and represents it more effectively than just about anything I’ve seen on the Internet yet.

Scott Karp faults Findory for failing to capture the serendipity of learning what you didn’t realize you needed to know…and, particularly, who else doesn’t know it yet.

“Perhaps the good old fashioned niche is as personalized as we need to get. TechMeme and Digg are highly niche sites, and thus are tailored to the specific interests of their users without getting so personalized as to break the bonds of community.”

Succeeding as a startup in online media is also part first-mover. It’s part aesthetics. It’s part who you know and who you adopt into your friends and family.

It’s also part editorial voice. I think Findory is an interesting mirror into my interests, but I’ve found that I’m not an interesting filter through which to view the world. There are probably few individuals who are. Similarly, what I liked most about Megite was seeing other people’s personalized news, not so much my own.

But there are many communities and concepts that filter the world of information in ways that are interesting and also matter in a particular context. The filter (or media brand) represents the community and gives meaning to the information. This is publishing 101 stuff, and it applies online as much as it does off.

Succeeding in online media is also part fashion. Findory never reached a critical mass of coolness. It’s hard to say what difference the fashion sense of the engineers and founders at startups makes in their ability to succeed, but decision-making at any company is driven at least in part by intuition, moreso at startups. Without keen intuition for market forces or at least your customers, your efforts will be out of synch with the world you live in.

Related to all this, I suspect the personalized My New York Times and similar publisher offerings are going to fail or at least prove lackluster for similar reasons. None of them are first-mover offerings. None of them are pretty or engaging. None of them provide a community filter that makes information relevant and interesting. They lose the editorial voice of their parent. They’re too hard to setup. And they just aren’t cool.

On the other hand, publishers can take the behavior data their readers are generating on the site and apply that in a way that surfaces interesting information or in fact connects them to similar people directly. TechMeme is a pureplay in this space, but it’s applicable at any media site. Greg Linden probably has great software to make that possible for all publishers’ sites.

I’m also curious to see how publishers pick up on socially engaging widgets like MyBlogLog and the new ways to build community within your domain. I like how Scott framed up the issue in this quote:

“Despite all the hype about the “user in control,” purely personalized news may be too much control, a slippery slope that leads to solipsism. The proverbial “water cooler” is symbolic of our fundamental need to share the news, to validate our experiences by sharing them with others. How can there be “conversation” if we’re all talking about something different?”

Nice.

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Screencasts mature…now with advertising!

I’m liking some of the innovations coming out of IDG’s InfoWorld these days (my old digs). I’m told the podcast advertising is working really well for them, but I’m particularly interested to see that they have begun screencasting in earnest…and it’s sponsored, to boot.

The InfoWorld home page now has the rotating feature box which yesterday included a link to a series of AJAX instructional screencasts. Among several related pieces, Peter Wayner produced a 7 minute instructional screencast on the Yahoo! user interface javascript libraries.

He begins by pointing out which libraries he likes and then proceeds to build a web page that utilizes the code. You can watch the screencaster type out his code and then demonstrate how it works.

Though raw in quality, the content was exactly right. The viewer is able to watch over the shoulder of someone who is at their computer working. It’s the online equivilent of Jacques Pepin…well, the finished product didn’t look all that tasty, but I learned something nonetheless.

Editor Steve Fox describes how screencasts answer the creative writing mantra ‘Show, don’t tell‘:

“After all, if you’re reading about how something works, you want to see it in action. That’s where the Web’s presentation capabilities open up stunning possibilities.“

Now, here’s the best part of the innovation…it has a video preroll…yes, an ad! A very brief video was baked into the beginning of the episode. Of course, I doubt Microsoft paid for this exposure being that it is so experimental, and they will be unable to measure success through traditional means, as there will be no clicks.

But show me an ad anywhere on the Internet that can capture my undivided attention better than this. And tell me how you could find a more targeted viewer than someone wanting to learn how to accomplish a specific task. It’s the best of both worlds – targeting and brand marketing.

What if this video clip was socializable (is that a word?) and caught fire around the web? InfoWorld should offer the embed script with each screencast so that someone can post it to their blog or their favorite video sharing site. And even better than that, the InfoWorld screencaster should actively post his screencasts to every video sharing site he can find and try to get some comment love from the people he’s connected to out there. Each screencast could live a contagious existence as people socialize it in different ways. InfoWorld already baked in the logo into the video stream, so any loss of control in the distribution is automatically mitigated by guaranteed brand exposure.

I’m sure critics will say that video on the Internet and video ads have been around for a long time, and podcasting already acts this way. I’d argue that this is actually really new.

Not only is the screencast format easier to produce than live action video and more compelling than podcasting, but the instructional nature of it gives the viewer and the screencaster a uniquely engaging relationship. As a result, the advertising in this environment can be much more relevant than your typical preroll video ad on news or entertainment content.

Of course, they can be fun to make, too. I’ll bet the editors are much more excited to narrate a screencast they can edit and produce on their own and distribute through the proven web page and RSS methods than they would be to sit in a mock studio with the marketing team telling them how to look good for the camera. It can’t be fun acting like you’re on TV fully aware that your webcast video audience will be a few hundred people at best after the clip gets posted behind an awkward lead capture wall.

Well done, guys. This is the kind of investment that could kick your online growth path well beyond the revenue tipping point.

Designing for the future

There’s a great presentation by William McDonough speaking at the Bioneers Conference back in 2000 about designing for the future available via Google Video (thanks Metafilter). He has a revolutionary perspective on how humanity needs to think about its current institutions and processes compared to the kind of future we’re currently designing for ourselves.

He talks about the design flaws in a society that doesn’t yet respect the rights of non human species or the future generations of life. The Endangered Species Act was passed only 30 years ago, the first acknowledgement that another species has a right to exist. He discusses the design flaws in the Industrial Revolution that led to man’s intent to constrain nature.

McDonough goes on to talk about waste and the idea of “throwing things away”. Such phrases and concepts will undoubtedly be challenged by our children who have to own the future waste problems today’s generations are creating for them. He asks how you would map the plutonian disposal locations buried deep below the earth’s surface today for generations thousands of years from now who will surely need to know where we put it.

Anyhow, this presentation really captured my imagination in several ways including the important question of what we are designing into our future world with today’s Internet innovations. What can we do today to at least mitigate if not correct the known errors in judgment made to date?

For example…

Social Decay
The tools of the Internet have enabled us to connect to other geographically diverse people in amazing ways at amazing speeds at low cost. In most cases, those connections are lighter and looser and less involved than the connections people create when spending time doing things together.

Are the lightweight connections on the Internet costing us time spent face-to-face? Are we isolating ourselves from the real world as we bury ourselves under the many media experiences surrounding us all the time? How can the Internet connect us more deeply and meaningfully to the people and the things that matter rather than distance us?

Information Classes
Knowledge is power. But the power of knowledge should never be used for subjugation.  Couldn’t we mitigate abuse of knowledge by giving everyone access to as much knowledge as they want to have?  Is Internet access a right on a global scale that should be protected for all? Should objective information such as independent journalism be not just a protected public service but a requirement for modern global society?

Energy Consumption


Photo: Fully Armed Vishnu

The power requirements needed to sustain all the web sites in the world are escalating. Are there other ways to power the Internet? Can computers and networks use less power and create less waste? Is it possible to have a entirely recyclable phone? More importantly, can they create power and reduce waste?

McDonough challenges traditional capitalism and government policy alike. He sees a triumverate forming where a “Bill of Responsibility” much like the “Bill of Rights” might reconstruct the incentives for making the world a better place. It’s not about creating efficiency but rather creating a design for growth.

The questions is, “What do you want to grow?”